


at the bottom

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Episode s02e03: Hunting, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24973975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: written for thesensory prompt"Frank & Kendall -  42. crunching ice at the bottom of the glass"
Relationships: Frank Vernon & Kendall Roy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	at the bottom

A knock echoes faintly behind the suite door, followed by another, and yet another. Frank looks up from his book and glances at the clock; it’s well past midnight now. He sighs, allows himself to entertain the idea of feigning sleep for just a moment, before standing up to get the door.

“Kendall,” he nods in greeting, glances over at the drinks Kendall has in hand. “Jet lag?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Kendall takes a step forward without asking, and so Frank opens the door wider without another word. “I couldn’t sleep well in New York, either.”

“That makes two of us, then,” Frank says as he closes the door behind Kendall.

They go to sit across from each other, Frank in an armchair and Kendall in the couch, the bottle set down between them on the coffee table. Their faces are half buried in shadows, the room dimly lit by a dying flame in the fireplace and the bedside lamp near which Frank was reading. There is a tray on the table with glasses, a bucket of ice, and an ornate vase housing a scentless decoy of a rose. Neither of them moves to pour the brown liquid.

“I have a message from dad,” Kendall swallows, raising his eyes to meet Frank’s. He has a quietness about him. There’s a glossy sheen to his pupils that could be mistaken for wetness, like the ice crystals clinging to the windowpane.

Frank smiles. “I suppose I shouldn’t touch the bottle, then,” it’s a joke, technically, but only half in jest.

“He’s offering you your job back. You’re invited to fly back with us in the morning if you accept, and if not,” Kendall shrugs. “He’s asking with the expectation of, well, you know.”

“Wouldn’t be a point in me coming all this way if we don’t let this play out, right?” Frank smiles, tight-lipped but relaxed. He is somewhat consoled by this—the presence of Kendall, _this_ Kendall, in front of him, not the one who nearly wrestled his brother to the ground in public, not the one who suggested a reprise of “boar on the floor” in deadpan, not the one who couldn’t look Frank in the eye before everything kicked off.

Kendall nods, leans over to reach for the ice and then the bottle. The ice cubes make quiet noises against each other as the alcohol makes contact. “Welcome back, Frank.”

“For the umpteenth time.”

“Dad won’t do Pierce without you. You know that.”

“Yeah, well,” Frank wraps a hand around the glass, chuckles softly. The liquor smells good, expensive, top notch. He doesn’t know if he should drink it, after the night he’s had. Frank all but planted his face on the pavement after tripping over the foot that Logan stretched out under his nose. He was entirely careless at the dinner table, rusty, gone soft, but Logan was all Logan—the unstoppable force and the immovable object, both at once. Truth be told, he was more disappointed in himself than horrified or disgusted by the events in that banquet hall.

“You remember what happened in ’97, Ken?”

“Uh-huh. Dad tried to go hostile on them, financing got in the way, you walked in there as the acceptable face and somehow got a job offer out of PGM that you used to negotiate a promotion from him.”

Frank chuckles. That wasn’t even a question, of course Kendall remembers. “Somehow I don’t think my face will be so acceptable to them now, twenty years later.”

Kendall tosses his head back, drains the glass in one gulp. His sobriety is something that Frank has always been careful to skirt around, even when they were VC’ing together, bouncing from start-up to start-up fueled by adrenaline and buzzwords.

“Dad knows what he’s doing. He…he knows what he wants,” Kendall refills his glass, his voice dropped low.

“And you, Ken?” Frank’s volume matches him, in turn, only slightly above a whisper.

“I’m here, so, you know,” he gestures vaguely towards the window. Frank looks over his shoulder. The flurries are getting thick enough to be visible from where they are seated, the treetops getting covered by dustings of white. The day for boar hunting was timed perfectly, not a beat too early or too late.

“You okay?” Frank asks again, same as he’d asked Kendall hundreds of times since Kendall’s adolescence, the same gentleness he tries to maintain without really expecting a response in earnest. Whatever terms Logan plans to offer Frank for his return to Waystar won’t be generous, and Kendall is sitting squarely in his father’s palm once again. There are too many moving parts lurking in the shadows—have been, since the wedding—and the one thing Frank knows for sure is that he cannot hope to know what they are. There is some part in him that finds it darkly funny to imagine what Stewy Hosseini must have felt like when he saw Kendall on TV, he who spoke so calmly and respectfully in abstaining from the vote of no confidence before.

And then the boars, herded through the open dirt road for a futile gamble for their lives, come to Frank’s mind. He chases the image away with a long sip of his drink.

Kendall shrugs, robotic again. “Do you want the psychodrama of the whole thing?” It wasn’t really a question.

“I guess not.”

“Good,” Kendall drinks again. It is strange to see him like this, after three years of sobriety, three years of seltzer with lemon slices at every cocktail event. There’s a void that unsettles Frank if he looks at Kendall too long, a loss so enormous that it almost seems like no change at all to the naked eye.

“Pierce is the key to our proxy defence. We are going to get it for dad.”

“Uh-huh, Gerri sent me her research after dinner. PGM needs the cash injection, we need to fend off the takeover. I can see the angle.”

“I told him you would come back,” Kendall sets the glass down with a light thud. There is a tiny smile hanging on the corners of his mouth. Frank can’t quite make out what it means.

“Did you want me back?”

“I mean, I’ve kind of been your golden parachute since I was eighteen, so…it’s all the same to me, right? Sam looked into everything before we even boarded the plane. You need money, we need your connections to Nan, Naomi…it’s a fair exchange.”

“Ouch,” Frank smiles, takes the hit in stride. It’s not much, but meanness is a better look on Kendall than passivity. “Well, thanks for thinking of an old friend.”

Kendall shakes his head. “You are family to him, Frank. I know it sounds crazy to say that with…how everything is, sometimes,” with a sharp inhale, Kendall leans over to rest his elbows on his knees, rubs two fingers under his nose, “but you are, in the one way that matters. Family never leaves.”

As he says the last three words, Kendall looks up at him. Frank nods, holds his gaze for two seconds before looking away to the window. He hasn’t drawn the curtains yet, and the windchill and dampness of snowfall are seeping through the windowpanes. A dull ache starts to creep up in his bones.

“Thanks, Ken. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah,” Kendall gets up to his feet, takes his glass again and empties everything into his mouth. He swallows every last drop of the drink and crunches the shrinking bits of ice against his teeth before swallowing that too. He tips the glass at Frank as if it is a known ritual between them.

Frank takes a modest sip from his own glass. He can’t help thinking about way Kendall bares his throat with every long gulp; the pale length of his throat, the unabashed display of vulnerability of a man at the end of the rope that he’s been given to hang himself. The way Logan shelters him, the only one willing to play along without surprise or indignance. There are too many pieces missing for the puzzle to be worked out.

“Good night, Frank,” Kendall says, pausing to look at Frank one last time before he walks out the door. From where he stands, the furthest corner from the light, and Frank can’t quite make out the details.

“Good night, Ken,” Frank replies, then opens his mouth again as if to say something that can mean something, but it doesn’t come out. Slack-jawed, he only grips the arms of his seat. His silence stretches through the night as the snow falls.


End file.
